"It was Mitt Romney saying, 'I know you have an absentee ballot and I know you haven't sent it in yet,' " Trulen said in an interview. "That just sent me over the line. Not only is it like Big Brother. It is Big Brother. It's down to where they know I have a ballot and I haven't sent it in! I thought when I requested the ballot that the only other entity that would know was the Mukwonago clerk.... It's alarming to me.... It's just not right. . . . It's like you can feel the tentacles creeping into your house under your door."

The calls to Trulen were likely part of the GOP's effort to get out the vote in what the party considers one of its strongest counties. Waukesha County is traditionally a Republican stronghold, just as Milwaukee tends to go for Democrats.

The irony is that the robocallers apparently haven't figured out Trulen is actually a minority in her county: She has been voting Democratic.

Headlines Politico, pointing its readers at a very effective ad that they might otherwise avoid:

The "questions" referred to in the headline are about who is helping Peterffy, a political neophyte, to make and place such ad. But there's nothing interesting there, and Peterffy comes across as an intelligent, persuasive independent:

Typically, such ads call for supporting or opposing specific candidates, but Peterffy’s ad is more vague because it doesn’t mention specific candidates — only an encouragement to vote Republican....

Peterffy said he supports Republican candidates because he sees the rhetoric of social justice and fairness from Democrats, including President Barack Obama, as a slippery slope. He also said Romney’s 47 percent comment reflected his own fears about the future of the country and was taken out of context.

“My understanding was that he said he had no ability to influence the 47 percent,” Peterffy said. “That’s the very logic I’m based on. I’m worried about when that 47 percent goes to 60 percent.”

Here's a useful map for those of you who are trying to picture the way the news will roll out on Tuesday night. What places will we hear from first? Where might we see surprisingly early evidence of a Romney blowout, if that's what's about to happen? The earliest sign might come from Virginia, where the polls close at 7 ET. I was imagining Pennsylvania as the possible first sign, but polls don't close there until 8, at which point we'll be seeing Michigan and Missouri. Ohio and North Carolina come in at 7:30, so the impression from Ohio will precede Pennsylvania.

On Thursday, someone texted [Julie Cervera] a photo of her daughter, Charliena Marquez, buying the winning ticket for her at a Palmdale Liquor store....

“I put my 99-cent glasses on, and I had to put two pairs on to see it,” said Cervera, 69, of Victorville. She recognized her daughter in the grainy photo, but she still couldn’t read the caption....

Cervera, a widow who has lived on disability for 20 years, said her family has been through difficult times recently. Last year her 47-year-old son Rudy was killed in a motorcycle accident, leaving four teenage children.

“I’d give it all up to have my son here again,” she said and began to cry...

“My grandkids are all going to be taken care of, and my (three) daughters,” she said. “I’m just so happy. I’m going to buy me a pair of Reeboks.”

Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

AND: Here, for comparison, is Barack Obama's speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, over which we will puzzle forever. What was it for? He didn't mention revenge, but he did mention King and he did mention love:

The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their fundamental faith in human progress – that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

(Why? Because they're driven by profits? Is that worse than being driven by votes?)

It might be better, because businesses have to offer something that moves you to part with your money. With a scheme of taxing and spending, government detaches the process of handing over our money from our thoughts about whether we think the benefits are worth it.

Yeah, when Obama appeared right outside my office window — just a few weeks ago — I got email telling me that if I looked out my window I could expect a visit from the police. Then they just shut down the whole law school building for the entire day and closed all the blinds. They hung a giant building-sized curtain all down one side of a dorm that had a view of the central mall where the President appeared.

And now he's coming back to the City of Obama Love — Madison, Wisconsin — to create a final burst of glowing adoration on the morning before Election Day, and our town is thrown into disarray once again for photo-op purposes, because we are the fresh-faced folk who still gaze upon him with awe. There are the young people — whose professors will undoubtedly free them from classes once again — and the aging liberals — who will surely feel the pull of the lugubrious dronings of Mr. Springsteen.

City employees have also been warned. "Offices facing MLK Jr., Blvd. and Wilson Street will need to be locked and vacant with the blinds drawn," Mayor Paul Soglin wrote in an email Friday afternoon to staff and city alders. "Adherence to this directive is imperative as the health and safety of our employees may be negatively impacted if we fail to enforce this directive," he added.

Adherence to this directive is imperative as the health and safety of
our employees may be negatively impacted if we fail to enforce this
directive.... jeez, he's talking like a robot! What are they threatening to do to us if we look out a window? Negatively impact us....

I write "#1" with confidence, as if I know I'll have additional reasons and this post is the first in a series.

"Irrelevant," because these will not be reasons that ought to have any influence on whether you should vote for Obama or not. (If you want to know what I'm doing and why, that post was yesterday.)

So here's the reason: It will be interesting to see what Obama does with himself if he is suddenly plunged into the circumstance of not being President. If Romney loses, no one will watch him, seeing what he does. He'll melt back into the general population. He's 65 years old. His accomplishments are accomplished. And if he never makes it to the presidency, he'll be a former candidate, not a former President. He doesn't even go back to an existing public office.

When's the last time a major party candidate lost without having a political position to which he could return? Not McCain. Not Kerry. They went back to the Senate. Oh, no! It was Al Gore! He found things to do to interest, entertain, and torment us. He would not be ignored. But he was a young man — young for a presidential candidate — only 52. It's possible that Romney will undertake some grandiose project, but it's nearly impossible to picture him going Gore on us. It's safe to predict that if Romney loses, he'll gracefully concede, wish us all well, and retire into private life, within which he'll be a loving husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, doing manifold good works that will receive no publicity.

But Obama! He's only 51. He was too green to have become President when he did, and he stumbled and lost — if he loses. He had so much promise that he hit the top early, and now all that ability, brought to bear too soon, goes forward into prime years... for what?! That's what's so interesting. We'll get to see what. We only get to see what's down that path if he loses: an irrelevant benefit to Obama's losing the election.

[Marc] Mezvinsky, a former Goldman Sachs banker, will soon start a hedge fund with a friend. The couple’s apartment, shared with a miniature Yorkshire terrier named Soren, after the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, is said to be overflowing with books. On the phone from Arkansas, Ms. Clinton talked about her husband’s continuous support and their habit of talking “about everything, almost sometimes ad nauseam.”

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either name your dog after a Danish philosopher or after a generic southern guy. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do one or the other — people will needle you about both.

***

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either vote for Barack Obama or not. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.

I never embedded this back when it came out about a month ago — just after the first debate. Everyone, it seemed, had already linked to it immediately — with good reason! — and I felt it was instantly too late to be pointing to it. But I must say, it's my favorite thing from the campaign season, Meade and I play it every day and sing lines from it when we're not playing it. We know all the words — within reason/unreason — and allude to them in daily casual conversation. The deep, truthy absurdity gets better and better and serves more and more fundamental needs as the electoral season crawls to its desperate end. Now, first, I want you two to turn and look at each other....

Loins. From what part of Axelrod's brain does that arise? I think of the first lines of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita": "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Who is this that darkeneth counsel
By words without knowledge?
Gird up now thy loins like a man;
For I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

Indeed, where was Obama when Jehovah laid the foundations of the earth Axelrod laid the foundations of his presidency?

It's Chelsea Clinton, tweeting from the dark zone of New York City. Nice that she's using Kindle. I hope she enters through the Althouse portal. I'm enjoying the new Camille Paglia book. Check that out! Art, culture, miscellanea. A good distraction, with some glossy pictures.

The Weekly Standard (linked by Drudge) thinks it has a hilarious Biden gaffe, but they've misheard/mistranscribed it. You have to have an ear for the "working class"-style mushing of syllables, but he's saying "There's never been a day in the last four years I haven't been proud to be his vice president." The boldface is spoken: I 'n' been.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says:

I've listened to the audio at 0.35 speed and it's a precise "I've."...

I disagree.

It's an east-coast kind of "n" ... sort of almost "i uh" like the "no" in "uh uh."

rhhardin says:

"n" is voiced and there's no voicing in Biden's 've part.

I note that I grew up in Delaware and I feel I understand the implied "n." And rh gives us his slowed down audio with repetition. I've listened, and I hear a sound after the "I" that I'm sure is the negative. There's this southern Jersey/northern Delaware/Philadelphia dropping of a sound that I can her. There's a muddled verb after the "I" that I just know. Rh says "Call in Language Log," and I will send an email. I think they will believe me. And not just for political reasons.

An email "Message to Our Customers" from Saks Fifth Avenue (intended mostly to be received in New York City). It's nice for the posh store to invite folks in to charge their electronic devices. Let's take note of the businesses that were kind to the powerless.

[T]he storm surge is the increased water level along the coast caused by winds continuously bulldozing the ocean onto the land. It builds long before a storm makes landfall. It simply raises the mean sea level from its normal level by a few to over 25 feet.

Sandy also hit at high tide, making the surge higher. The damage from a surge also has to do with coastal topography and bathymetry.

Hurricane Katrina was “only” a Category 3 storm at landfall, yet ended up being the most costly natural disaster in our nation’s history due its impact on a vulnerable, highly populated low lying city. Sandy had Category 1 winds at landfall yet was able to create very significant storm surge over hundreds of miles of highly populated coastline.

I found that article because I was trying to figure out what "category" Sandy was. I wasn't sure it was even Category 1, and I wondered what would happen if a Category 3 (or 4 or 5) storm hit NYC. I also found this article in Popular Mechanics, describing a study of the consequences of a Category 4 hurricane hitting NYC. The estimate was $500 billion in damage. A study released last September said a "Category 1 hurricane or winter nor'easter could inundate the city's subway and cause $58 billion in losses"... which sounds like what happened.

We're not children. We don't like to be spoken to as if we are children. And we don't like the use of children in politics. And the photographer did a particularly bad job at cute-ifying those children, whose expression has nothing to do with the way kids feel about 1. report cars and 2. whether adults are voting.

You can't tell from the return address what politics underlie this mailing, but it's easy enough to find it in Wikipedia:

Working America is an allied organization of the AFL-CIO which works to build alliances among non-union working people. Working America is a nonpartisan, non-profit organization which provides workers who are not union members input into the policies, goals, and legislative efforts of the AFL-CIO.

I'm sick and tired of Bridgeport being shortchanged," [Mayor Bill] Finch said, noting that Bridgeport has the largest number of United Illuminating ratepayers and claimingg it should be treated better by the New Haven-based utility.

United Illuminating has denied giving priority to wealthy customers, while ignoring Bridgeport residents.

Writes Ruth Anne Adams in the comments to the "last 72 hours" post. She adds "But if you're going the way of Colin Powell not so much" and "But if you could at least reveal your voting preference in the next few hours, that could win a wager or seven."

I think she's misremembering what the "lost me" posts of the past were about. I started blogging in 2004, a presidential election year, and, after much coverage of the election, including a commitment to something I called "cruel neutrality," on September 26th, I wrote a post called "How Kerry lost me." This wasn't me explaining why I was going to vote against Kerry. It was me acknowledging how I felt and realizing that I could mine the blog archive to discover where that feeling came from.

Yet I find myself expressing an increasing amount of hostility to Kerry, so I thought I'd go back and trace the arc of my antagonism through my various posts.

It was a bloggy project, solving a mystery about myself by taking advantage of the archive. For example, I found the wellspring of my antagonism in a single remark: "You're not listening" (said to a man who asked him what his position on Iraq was, as if the man had simply failed to pay attention to some supposedly previously stated position, when I too had been waiting for Kerry to answer that question). And I found what was, to me, "his final, fatal mistake" (disrespecting Allawi!), which prompted me to write the "lost me" post.

In 2008, I wrote "How McCain lost me," which may have created the impression that "lost me" posts are an Althouse blog tradition. That post was written after the election, but — I said at the time — "it's the same in that I'm mining my blog archive to try to understand how my resistance to the candidate formed and hardened and caused me to vote for the other man."

I know that I voted against McCain. Up through August, I genuinely didn't know which candidate I'd vote for, but I knew I was taking more shots at Obama and therefore giving the impression that I favored McCain. I didn't trust Obama, and I feared (and still fear) what Obama would do with a Democratic Congress. McCain was a more familiar character, less fun to write about, and he was also the underdog. But by mid-October, I knew that unless something big happened, I would vote for Obama. It was nothing new that Obama did. I didn't start liking him more, and I never got caught up in the Obama lovefest.

It was a lot of work to mine that archive. Oddly, despite all that work, my commenters have accused me for the last 4 years of having fallen for Obama delusions. But the point of the work was not to drum anything into your head. It was, as it had been in 2004, an effort to see where my decision happened. That's what I'm interested in: How people think, where, in the emotional/reasoning mind of an individual, does a decision take place? The blog archive gave me the ability to examine that. What I wrote in the "lost me" posts of the last 2 elections was not anything like a newspaper's endorsement of a candidate or an argument designed to persuade anyone to agree with me. It has more to do with my professional interest in how judges make decisions: How does the human mind work?

Why haven't I done a "lost me" post this time around? I haven't had the experience of noticing that there is a mystery that I could solve by delving into old blog posts. As you can see in that last indented paragraph, above, I didn't trust Obama, and I feared what he would do with a Democratic Congress. We all saw what he did with a Democratic Congress. He let Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have their way with him. It was horrible. It led to the Tea Party and the trouncing Democrats took in 2010. I've felt no connection to the Democratic Party since then. Of course, I don't like half of what the Republicans stand for, but I've still voted for some of them, notably Ron Johnson and (twice!) Scott Walker, because... what choice do I have? The Democrats have been leading us into financial ruin.

If I could have been assured that the GOP would control both houses of Congress, I might have thought Obama would be good. I like balance, moderation, and pragmatism. If one of the hardcore righties had won the Republican nomination, I would probably have gone for Obama. But Mitt Romney got the nomination, which is what I had been hoping for (after Mitch Daniels decided not to run). It was time to pay attention again to Obama The Candidate, and his campaign centered on vilifying Mitt Romney in the most inane Occupy-Wall-Street style that was completely alienating to me. Romney seamlessly transitioned from being my choice in the primaries to being my presumptive choice for President. I remained open to Obama. Obama could have won me.

‘‘Some of the voting machines do have battery backup,’’ New York State Board of Elections spokesman Tom Connolly told the Associated Press. ‘‘We are also planning to get generators to polling sites, but it’s not like we have an unlimited supply of generators.’’ In New York City members of the Board of Elections have been assessing the damage to polling places, and Mayor Bloomberg said they might have to use alternative locations in some cases. The Daily News reports that in devastated areas like Breezy Point and the Rockaways, voting may take place in tents equipped with generators.

While Christie has been occupied by relief efforts, in New Jersey Secretary of State and Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno said on Thursday that the state is planning to deploy military trucks to polling stations that have lost power. Guadagno said people at these locations will vote using a paper ballot....

Presumably, there will be a way for everyone who tries to vote to be able to vote, but fewer people will try. There's some complacency: "Since the states hit hardest are all solidly blue, lower voter turnout won't swing the presidential election...." The state gets the same number of electoral votes regardless of how many people actually vote. That means, however, that lower turnout concentrates the power of those who do vote. If enough of the "red" people in those blue states get out when the "blue" people stay home, the state — and all its electoral votes — could go to the "wrong" candidate. Or do you imagine that would only happen if the election ended up being a blowout for Romney anyway?

How far back do you need to scroll in the history of Electoral Maps to get to a year where New Jersey/New York/Connecticut picked the Republican? 1988 to get New Jersey and Connecticut. 1984 to get New Jersey and Connecticut and New York. 1984, of course, was a complete blowout for Reagan, with Mondale getting only his home state of Minnesota, but 1988 was pretty much of a blowout too.

A recent New Jersey poll — just before the hurricane hit — had Obama ahead by only 10 points. He won by 16 points in 2008, and older polls showed him with a bigger lead. It's not inconceivable that the state that elected Chris Christie could choose Romney even without a hurricane-depressed turnout.

November 1, 2012

Obama and Springsteen are arriving as a team. Obama, sans Springsteen, was just here last month, but apparently he thinks this city needs more prompting, this time with Springsteen added. Springsteen was here in '04 with the Democratic nominee, John Kerry. And the state did, in fact, go for Kerry.

Meanwhile, Bob Dylan will be in town on the same day, not in anyone's tow and with no politicians in tow, but along with Mark Knofpler.

Photographer and autographer collector Mark Wilkins said a Romney administration would “bring back the same old boring celebrities we saw back when Bush was around.”

“Trace Adkins, all those country stars that no one really cares about,” said Wilkins. “I hope Romney doesn’t get elected because it will slow things down. Right now, there are celebs visiting the White House, four, five times a week that we don’t even know about until after they leave. Romney? Who wants to visit Romney?”

Some people said they had been turned away from hotel lobbies, other banks and cafes near 40th Street when asked if they could charge their phones. It was as if, said Gabriella Sonam, a massage therapist who had biked up from the East Village, they did not even know a national emergency was going on just across the street.

The official report on the incident released by the Madison Police Department on Oct. 11 describes the confiscated property as not only bed rolls and suitcases, but cardboard boxes, grocery bags, trash bags, and containers of alcohol. “Many items were wet and appeared to have been left for several days,” the report says. Wray is quoted as saying it is a “tough job” to manage public spaces, particularly in the area of the Capitol Square, where, the report says “property – with no identification – is often abandoned, or left unattended or long periods of time.”

While I don't think what the police did was wrong and there's no need to be "contrite," there are many good aspects to the sympathetic communication with the troubled citizens we see in this video:

There is no professed motivation for Christie’s newfound feelings for the president, other than that the two men are now partners in a massive effort to rebuild his state. Asked about the election on “Fox & Friends,” Christie said, “I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested,” adding: “If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.”

I want to say Chris Christie is saying and doing the right thing, not only morally and in his own political interest, but in the interest of Mitt Romney and the GOP. Saying it's not political and acting like politics are suspended, the best approach morally, happens also to be the best approach politically.

It's good politically because it's a vivid demonstration of devotion to public service and the capacity to rise about partisanship and do the things that need to be done.

Compare the Christie's interaction with Obama to the way Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco interacted with President Bush after Hurricane Katrina. Here's how Bush described some of it in his book "Decision Points" (at page 308-309):

The initial plan had been for me to land at the New Orleans airport, pick up Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin, and survey the damage on an aerial tour. But on the Marine One flight from Mississippi, we received word that the governor, mayor, and a Louisiana congressional delegation were demanding a private meeting on Air Force One first.

The tone started out tense and got worse. The governor and mayor bickered. Everyone blasted the Federal Emergency Management Agency for failing to meet their needs. Congressman Bobby Jindal pointed out that FEMA had asked people to email their requests, despite the lack of electricity in the city. I shook my head. “We’ll fix it,” I said, looking at FEMA Director Mike Brown. Senator Mary Landrieu interrupted with unproductive emotional outbursts. “Would you please be quiet?” I had to say to her at one point.

During that hearing, [Zimmerman's lawyer Mark] O'Mara said his client had been the subject of a carefully orchestrated national media campaign by attorneys for Trayvon's family, who had traveled the country, portraying the former Neighborhood Watch volunteer as a racist murderer.

De la Rionda accused O'Mara of trying to taint potential jurors. All he wanted, de la Rionda said, is to have a fair trial, and the best way to do that is to prohibit all attorneys from talking about or publishing information about the case....

In arguing against the gag order Friday, O'Mara said that when he first took Zimmerman's case, his office was inundated with thousands of pieces of email and media queries, so he created a website, where he regularly posts blogs and court documents....

A dozen news organizations, including the Orlando Sentinel, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and CNN, opposed the gag order, calling it extreme and unnecessary.

Commenting on the super-storm disaster, one person who identifies himself as a professor of religion tweeted: “We ask God to destroy them all, and not keep one of them,” because the United States “supports war and abuse towards Muslims.”

And the beneficent:

Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti also criticized gloaters over Sandy. He tweeted: “Who told you that children, students, women and men in America wish you [Muslims] death? Politicians like Mubarak and Bush are one thing, and humanity is something else.”

In the same vein, Engy Hamdi, political activist and member of Egypt’s April 6 Movement, wrote on her Twitter account, “Did Islam teach us to gloat amid the misfortunes of people?"

"It's easier to laugh about it than to think about how State House coverage is dying," said Daniel Moraff, a Brown student and "aspiring comedy writer," whom some fools denounced as an idiot for saying things like "I don't really believe there's a hurricane... I know the government wants us to think that...."

"... everything would descend into chaos. But perhaps free people are generally capable of acting decently on their own. Of course, that's never going to be universal; but then, people break the law too. In fact, a dense set of rules tempts people to see how close to (or how far across) the borderline of legality they can go without being penalized. In the absence of governmental laws, people might focus more on other kinds of laws: social norms and ethics."

But Public Defender Matthew Hardy said the boy, who had learning disabilities, pulled the trigger after being manipulated to kill Hall by his stepmother, Krista F. McCary. Hardy portrayed her as angry over the possibility her husband was about to leave her for another woman.

"We are not going to suggest she killed him," Hardy told the judge. "She used this young man to kill him."...

Who will superintend the superintendents? If it's the superintendent of public instruction, apparently, nobody, because "the superintendent of public instruction... is unique among state department heads in having his duties spelled out in the state constitution."

John Hayes said that we can “no longer have wind turbines imposed on communities” and added that it “seems extraordinary” they have allowed to spread so much throughout the country.

The energy minister said he had ordered a new analysis of the case for onshore wind power which would form the basis of future government policy, rather than “a bourgeois Left article of faith based on some academic perspective.”...

“We can no longer have wind turbines imposed on communities. I can’t single-handedly build a new Jerusalem but I can protect our green and pleasant land.”

The poem was inspired by the apocryphal story that a young Jesus, accompanied by his uncle Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant, travelled to what is now England and visited Glastonbury during Jesus' lost years. The legend is linked to an idea in the Book of Revelation.... describing a Second Coming, wherein Jesus establishes a new Jerusalem. The Christian Church in general, and the English Church in particular, used Jerusalem as a metaphor for Heaven, a place of universal love and peace.

"But they were a group in real-time trying to mobilize marines and C-130s and the fighter aircraft, and they were told explicitly by the White House stand down and do nothing. This is not a terrorist action. If that is true, and I’ve been told this by a fairly reliable U.S. senator, if that is true and comes out, I think it raises enormous questions about the president’s role, and Tom Donilon, the National Security Adviser’s role, the Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who has taken it on his own shoulders, that he said don’t go. And that is, I think, very dubious, given that the president said he had instructions they are supposed to do everything they could to secure American personnel."

Reading Morris's explanation below the video at the link, I see that — spoiler alert! — everyone in the video is actually going to vote and they were prompted to think about how people who don't vote must think. I'm seeing that after watching the video. So to the extent that these people seem dumb... ish... it's at least partly that they are attempting to embody the persona of other people, who they probably think are dumb. So we're seeing a subtle blend of opinion about the nonvoters.

At the end we see that the video was produced with Our Time, and I assume the intent is to improve the turnout for Barack Obama, but in style and substance, it's nicely neutral and quite amusing and charming.

What is the main thing people miss when the power is out? I think it's the capacity to recharge the cell phone. People waited in line for an hour to get to a power strip running from a CNN truck that was parked outside that building that lost its facade in the storm.

By mutual agreement, the people there had somehow decided that when someone filled up to 50 percent, it was time to unplug and let the next person go.

It's heartening the way people pull together in a tragedy and interesting to see it happening over the new core necessity, the cell phone.

Actually, it's not a very scientific poll, just a blog poll put up by lawprof Brian Leiter. Why would only lawprofs vote? I'm sure Leiter has non-lawprof readers. But what's most important is that Leiter's readers — lawprof or non-lawprof — probably skew left, even more than the usual group of lawprofs.

In which case: 19%! Wow! Huge!

We'll see what kind of "lawprof" result is achieved through a poll at lawprof Althouse's blog site:

Tentatively, the week will feature a sexuality day, multicultural day, religious diversity day, women’s day and a disability day.

The group also debated how to address “intersectionality” between the different types of diversity.

The student chair of the Diversity Committee "said she hopes the event would probe students’ minds and make them think about how their own identities are 'compiled.'"

"We are trying to say to people that you don’t have to be a minority, you don’t have to be an underrepresented group to be able to feel like you’re diverse or that you have a unique identity... This is really for all students."

I don't think the word "diverse" should apply to an individual. I think you have to say: This set of individuals is diverse. Not: This individual is diverse. Sorry to be pedantic about words. Now, it's interesting that the Diversity Committee has arrived at the idea that it wants specifically to get the attention of the students who do not belong to "underrepresented groups." The students who were not pursued by the University in its effort to increase "diversity" might, it is thought, respond to the idea that they are part of the diversity too. I'm trying to picture Diversity Week events that would convey that message!

Something I said in the comments to an October 2008 post titled "So, I've been thinking of getting a dog...." Note that I met Meade in January 2009 and married him later that year. Here's the context of the highlighted quote. I'd said I was thinking of getting a poodle and somebody said "Ann, women with poodles are like men in shorts." My response was:

Eh, if I was just trying to get men to like me, I would have kept my mouth shut about not liking them in shorts. But it's an interesting issue: What dog should a woman get if what she wants is to make herself as attractive as possible to men?

Somebody else, recommending boxers, said "they sleep a lot, and especially love to sleep with you," and I said:

Is that considered a plus? There is no way on earth I want to sleep with a dog (unless it's some sort of emergency freezing survival situation).

The question in the case was whether journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates could show they had been harmed and so had standing to sue, and several justices seemed open to the idea....

The possibility that the courts may never rule on the constitutionality of the law seemed to rankle some of the justices. “Is there anybody who has standing?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked....

Justice Antonin Scalia [said] “We’ve had cases in the past where it is clear that nobody would have standing to challenge what is brought before this court... That just proves that under our system of separated powers, it is none of our business.”

... to everyone who made purchases through my Amazon portal in the month of October. Believe me, I notice the gesture of support for this blog made by your taking the trouble to go in through my link. And it's really almost no trouble at all, yet it makes a big difference to me. It's encouraging! And I thank you.

(The link is always there in the subtitle line of the banner at the top of the page.)

1. Focusing on breasts works for everybody: Men love breasts and women feel cared for.

2. Treating women's bodies as a special problem, requiring special attention, works for the most retrograde traditionalists and for progressive feminists.

3. Women tend to monitor their health and consume more health care services, especially these preventive programs. There are no programs for men, because men wouldn't respond to programs. The main use of men is getting them into the insurance pool to contribute to the cost of caring for women and children.

4. Women actually need and deserve more care. Men are expendable. There is a shared social interest in preserving the women for reproductive purposes, for the maintenance of stable households, for the nurturing of children, and for looking after the elderly.

".... they must tell us something about the nature of a fetus that makes the state’s interest in protecting it more compelling than its interest in protecting a woman’s right to make basic decisions about her own body. As pain sentience does not serve as a basis for legal prohibitions in general (or else mousetraps and deer hunting would be prohibited), the statutes’ real purpose is to use potential evidence of pain sentience in fetuses to indicate the presence of something far more compelling — namely, personhood."

The states are already allowed to prohibit abortion after viability (with exceptions for the life and health of the mother), but not because viability establishes that the fetus has turned into a person. In fact, the Supreme Court has never made much sense over why viability is the line. (I've taught the abortion cases many times, and the best I can say is that viability was chosen for the line because the Court wanted a place to draw a line and viability was a concept that existed within medicine.) The question of when the unborn is considered a "person" is reserved for the woman to answer for herself. That's the heart of the right that the Court has articulated. It was clearly stated in terms of autonomy to define life in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when the Court revised Roe in the process of deciding not to overrule it:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.

It's interesting for Egginton to offer some philosophical analysis (and for neuroscientists to provide the information they have), but under Roe/Casey, it's for the individual pregnant woman to use that material as she sees fit in arriving at her own answer to the mystery of the value of the unborn entity. Pre-viability, anyway.

Several sources have pointed to the possibility that a major CIA gun-running operation aimed at arming anti-Assad Al-Qaeda-affiliated forces was in danger of being exposed. If true, the information casts an even more devastating pall over the Benghazi terrorist attack and the administration’s botched handling of the region.

The decision to stand down as the Benghazi terrorist attack was underway was met with extreme opposition from the inside. The Washington Times's James Robbins, citing a source inside the military, reveals that General Carter Ham, commander of U.S. Africa Command, who got the same emails requesting help received by the White House, put a rapid response team together and notified the Pentagon it was ready to go. He was ordered to stay put. “His response was to screw it, he was going to help anyhow,” writes Robbins. “Within 30 seconds to a minute after making the move to respond, his second in command apprehended General Ham and told him that he was now relieved of his command.”

If true, Ham has apparently decided he wants no part of the responsibility for the decision not to help those in harm’s way. He is not alone. As the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol revealed late Friday, a spokesperson, “presumably at the direction of CIA director David Petraeus,” released the following statement: "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.”

We've been getting great results using the cooking-with-water method — doubt it, but try it! — and the Wellshire dry-rub center-cut bacon (from Whole Foods). But today, Meade — needing to take a borrowed dog swimming and to interact with some housepainters — left it slow-cooking for 3 hours.

"... threatened a volunteer for Pocan’s Republican opponent days before the volunteer was found beaten. Last Wednesday, Kyle Wood, a full-time volunteer with Republican Chad Lee’s Congressional campaign, was beaten inside his home in Madison by a yet-unidentified attacker who claimed that as a gay man Wood should be supporting the gay candidate for Congress."

This is an extremely disturbing story that appears at Media Trackers, which describes itself as "a conservative non-profit, non-partisan investigative watchdog." This elaborates on the report which we discussed here, 3 days ago. At the time, I said: "Real or hoax? I don't know, but I remember Ashley Todd from the '08 election season."

ADDED: If these really are texts from Pocan's partner, we ought to know more about the whole context. Maybe these 2 men have been exchanging playful texts that would make this material feel more like joking. Releasing this texting conversation makes it fair for the other side to release other conversations, and yet it's not in Pocan's interest to draw attention to any of this.

UPDATE: Media Trackers has taken down the long text conversation it previously posted.

[I]t is probably unwise to anticipate what affects [sic] the storm might have within particular states, such as whether it might affect the Democratic parts of Pennsylvania more than the Republican ones. Hurricane Sandy is just too large a storm, and has such unpredictable destructive potential, to make reliable guesses about this.

Why would it be unwise to anticipate something? It's just speculation based on the available evidence. I suspect Silver is saying that because his methodology involves processing polling, but I don't see what's unwise about thinking about other things unless you impute more weight to the evidence than it deserves. And even if you do... so what? We're just guessing about what will happen in the future. No one is relying on any of this. We're just talking about the future event as we pass the time waiting for Election Day.

Staring at the polls too long. What's going to happen in Wisconsin? Who'll take the Electoral College? My guess is: Obama will squeak by or Romney will win a lot. Bob Wright anticipates bad unemployment numbers coming out before the election. I wonder about the effect of the Benghazi scandal, Bob tries to wave it off into oblivion, saying he's "kind of tuned it out." I keep going... for quite a while. In the end, Bob asks why I agitate him so and concludes it's because I say "crazy things." I tell him to "check the transcript."

According to Stanley Kurtz, it's a plot to realign the electorate, "creating a long-term Democratic majority that would allow him and his successors to stop catering to the center and finally govern decisively from the left."

Somehow, within the lulling smallness, there's a scary bigness.

Obama’s frantic efforts to gin up the women’s vote and the youth vote aren’t only desperate attempts to secure his base. They flow from a deliberate decision not to fight for the center, but to build an independent majority on what is supposedly the “demographically ascendent” left.

Over at The Nation, Richard Kim gets it. Writing about the Lena Dunham “first time” ad controversy, he speaks of it as part of an effort “to realign the electorate towards the Democratic Party for a generation.” But the best place to read about Obama’s larger strategy is “Hope: The Sequel,” the New York magazine piece by John Heilemann that got attention last May.... describ[ing] an Obama campaign willing to risk turning off socially conservative Democrats and independent voters by hyping leftist social issues....

That reminds me of the way Republicans turn off the socially liberal folks (like me) who would be receptive to the rest of what they have to offer. The 2 parties have corresponding strategies, including trying to scare people about how extreme the other party really intends to be. I don't trust any of them.

One of my theories is that Obama was preoccupied by what had happened in Benghazi 3 weeks ago, perhaps scrambling to keep it from turning into a scandal that would sink his campaign. Bob Wright's response is — absurdly — to bring up the ridiculous old theory that the high altitude in Denver played havoc with Obama's big brain.

I explain why the answer is probably no, and that if it were yes, it would hurt the GOP:

This clip begins with an explanation of what Chief Justice Roberts did in the Obamacare case. Also, I speculate about what kind of Justices a President Romney might appoint. I don't expect them to be such staunch conservatives.

October 28, 2012

Sandy's coming, and the waters may flow up into the low-lying East Coast cities. If coastal cities flood and the people there — who are disproportionately Democratic — get distracted by their personal difficulties or find it hard to get to the polls, then the upstate folks — who may be more Republican — will have greater power to tip the state's electoral votes to Romney.

It was 4 years ago that Obama gave that grandiose "this was the moment" speech
where he said "This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to
slow...." What irony if the rise of the oceans thwarts his reelection!

On Fox News Sunday today, the Wisconsin Senator made it all about Benghazi. The moderator gave him the last word after a long colloquy, including him and Senators Warner, Udall, and Portman, and he said:

Chris, the American people have the right to know. And that is what they are demanding here in Wisconsin.

Let's face it. What was the president doing, during those seven hours? Did he give that directive? Or didn't he? Did Leon Panetta directly defy him? I mean, what happened?

Who sent out? Who sent Ambassador Rice out five days later when they knew it was a terrorist attack that was preplanned, sent her on Sunday talk shows to say in fact it was a spontaneous reaction to, of course, the video. This administration purposefully misled the American people for weeks. This president misled the American people for weeks.

And, I think the American people have the right to know.

It was either misleading or is incompetent. I think we are finding out it was probably both, misleading and incompetence on the part of this administration. The American people have the right to know.

"That directive" refers to what Rob Portman was talking about earlier:

... the ambassador asked for more security after a series of terrorist threats and attacks, but didn’t get it, even on the anniversary of September 11. The administration knew that four Americans had been killed in a successful terrorist attack by an al Qaeda affiliate, but lied about the event for weeks in hopes of minimizing political fallout. Extraordinarily courageous Americans fought a seven-hour gun battle against well-armed and well-organized terrorists who vastly outnumbered them before finally succumbing, during which time the Obama administration did nothing. And when the bodies of the dead Americans were returned to the United States, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton misappropriated the occasion to deliver politically-motivated lies, both to the victims’ survivors and to the American people. All of that we now know for sure. If, in addition, there is credible evidence that American soldiers, fighting desperately for their lives against our country’s most bitter enemies, called for help but were cynically left to perish in order to protect Barack Obama’s petty re-election campaign, Obama will not only lose the election but will be turned out of office in disgust by a clear majority of voters. Reporters and editors know this. It will be interesting to see how they respond during the coming days: will they do their jobs, or will they assist their candidate with his cover-up?

I presume they would say — if they deigned to answer Power Line's question — that the Benghazi story is too complicated and inflammatory to resolve in the narrow time before the election and that it's unfair to dump this hugely burdensome issue on the President now. It would have an undue effect on the minds of the voters, who must be protected from an emotional flare-up which will keep them from weighing all the issues in the proper proportion. This is especially true — they would not say out loud — when the skewing goes against their preferred candidate. Of course, an equivalent issue affecting the incumbent in 2004 would have been splattered everywhere.

A Romney victory would give us the benefit of leaving the Benghazi scandal in the past. It will still be important to investigate, but it won't — like the Watergate scandal, after the Nixon re-election — cripple a sitting President.

To be fair, it clicks through to a gallery of past endorsements that makes it glaringly clear that the Times always endorses the Democratic candidate. You have to scroll back over a half century to get a different result.

But keep scrolling. Once you get down past mid-20th century, there are plenty of Republicans mixed in, and if you'll scroll down to the bottom, you'll get to that famous face they selected to illustrate today's editorial, Abraham Lincoln. A Republican.

The Times endorsed Lincoln in 1860 and again, when he ran for reelection, in 1864. The photo used in today's Obama endorsement is the 1864 Lincoln. How much the man aged in 4 years! Here is the 1860 Lincoln:

It will not be easy... for Mr. Lincoln to do much mischief, even if he should be disposed. We have great confidence in his pacific and conciliatory disposition. He seems to us much more like to be too good-natured and tolerant towards his opponents, than not enough so. Rail-splitting is not an exciting occupation. It does not tend to cultivate the angry passions of the heart...

The rail-splitting metaphor is then worked into the opinion that Lincoln will govern as a moderate pragmatist.

The 2 photos of Barack Obama, 2008 and 2012, differ much less from each other than the 2 pics of Lincoln. And the old 2008 endorsement doesn't contain any vivid writing telling us what sort of mind is produced by the the work of community organizing and how Obama will govern in the manner of a community organizer.